Swinub

Forty centimeters tall and 6.5 kilos, and most of that is fur. A brown coat with lighter stripes covers its entire head, to the point that its eyes are never visible in any official illustration. The only thing sticking out at the front is its pink snout.

That snout is the whole character. Pokédex entries talk about almost nothing else: it rubs its muzzle against the ground to dig up food, and what it likes best is a mushroom that grows beneath withered grass. If it catches an interesting scent, it dives headfirst without a second thought to find where it came from. The side effect of that obsession is the detail everyone remembers: sometimes, while digging, it hits hot springs.

Its official category is Pig Pokémon, although the design is closer to a wild boar. It is the first of three forms and by far the smallest: at level 33 it evolves into Piloswine, which swaps the piglet look for a full-sized woolly animal, and from there comes Mamoswine, the tusked mammoth the second generation never got to have. Its Pokédex-assigned habitat is caves.

Two hundred and fifty base stat points, with not a single stat reaching 51. Three tied at the top—HP, Attack, and Speed, all three at 50—40 Defense, and a pair of 30s in the special stats that rule it out of any exchange with a special attacker.

What half-saves it is Thick Fat, its hidden ability: it weakens Fire- and Ice-type attacks, so it fixes exactly two of the five bad matchups in its typing. Because Ice and Ground defend terribly. Water, Grass, Fire, Fighting, and Steel hit it for double damage; it only resists Poison and is only immune to Electric. Snow Cloak needs snow to be worth anything, and Swinub itself can set it up with Snowscape, but spending a turn on that with 40 Defense is hard to justify. Oblivious prevents infatuation and Taunt, and not much else.

On offense, the pairing does work: Ground punishes Steel, Fire, Rock, and Electric, while Ice covers Flying, Dragon, Grass, and Ground. The problem is the timetable. Earthquake does not appear until level 45 and Blizzard until 50, twelve and seventeen levels after a normal Swinub has stopped being one. Ice Shard arrives in time at 15, giving it priority to finish off weakened opponents, and Icy Wind at 30, which also lowers the target’s Speed. TMs bring Ice Beam and Earth Power forward for anyone willing to spend them on something that is about to shed its skin.

It is not competitive, and with a 250 total it cannot be. Its place is in a normal playthrough, in the snowy half of Johto or Sinnoh, and as the mandatory step on the way to Mamoswine.

A single Egg Group, Field, the catch-all drawer for quadrupeds, which lets it breed with half the Pokédex. The gender split is clean: 50% female, without the usual trap of male-heavy ratios. Twenty incubation cycles comes out to roughly 5355 steps using (cycles+1)×255.

What matters in breeding is one specific move. Ancient Power is passed down as an Egg Move, and Ancient Power is the key to the end of the line: Piloswine evolves into Mamoswine by leveling up while knowing it, so a Swinub that hatches with it gets the requirement out of the way without having to think about it again. The rest of the Egg Move pool has some useful options: Icicle Crash, a physical Ice-type move with 85 power, more than twice the power of the Ice Shard it learns by level; Freeze-Dry, which hits Water types hard despite being Ice; and Fissure, the one-hit KO Ground-type move that almost never lands. It also inherits Bite, Curse, and Double-Edge.

The evolution into Piloswine is level 33 and nothing more: no items, no time of day, no friendship. The only thing slowing it down is its Slow experience growth rate, which makes that 33 more expensive than it looks.

Its catch rate, 225, is thirty points short of the maximum possible: a regular Poké Ball and a little prior damage are enough. In the wild, it may be holding a Persim Berry or Never-Melt Ice.